Sarah Sze The Triple
Point of Water, 2003
Mixed media, Collection of the artist; courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery,
photography by David Allison

With her installation "The
Triple Point of Water" in the Whitney's appropriately moat-like sculpture
court, Sarah Sze has once again pulled off a provocative fusion of whimsy
and grandeur. She proves herself a successor of one of the house gods
of the Whitney: Alexander Calder. In both artists, gaiety, wit, and invention
prove to be vehicles, not obstacles, to aesthetic depth. Both achieve
an oxymoronically bravura fragility.

In a zany, cartoonish, and
schematic way, Ms. Sze's installation represents an eco-system. The word
"represents," in this case, could equally be used to mean "depicts"
or "constitutes." For the true marvel of Ms. Sze's creation
is that interdependence is not just the work's subject matter but its
defining quality. The way in which artifice and nature interact in her
handling of materials, the relationship between the found and the manipulated,
the micro and the macro, are all symbiotic. The real beauty is that ultimately
even what could be construed as faults - flimsiness, arbitrariness - are
folded back into the meaning of the work: stabilizing as a metaphor of
the preciousness of life.

The piece incorporates actual
plants, which sit primly in their pots, leaves and branches stuck into
squares of insulation board that are punched along the edges to read like
eroded continental plates. These squares rest horizontally on a complex
grid of vertical pipework sending water through the installation, coursing
out here and there to fill a fish tank or sprinkle a plant. The flora
sometimes grow out, sometimes through, this unlikely support. There's
no attempt to disguise the found quality of this polyurethane material,
which still sports its trademark "Pactiv." Intermingling with
the plants and grasses are finely modelled mountain ranges, which entirely
throw any sense of scale. (These could equally be artist-made or readymade
from a model kit, and cutely recall the Whitney's Charles Simonds sculpture,
"Dwellings" [1981], permanently installed in their stairwells.)

And then there are scattered
household objects - push-pins, scissors, a tape measure, and so on. Typically
of Ms. Sze, these are color-coded; on the top layer, for instance, orange
is the predominant color, which could relate to an idea of light, because
rays of light in the form of orange string crown the whole of her creation.

The wall label invites a somewhat
literal reading of the piece in site-specific terms (life beneath the
sidewalk), but this is arguably too limiting. It is much more fun to imagine
"Triple Point" as a mad scientist's model of the world. That
adds an element of desperation to the hi-jinks, to the kindergarten-cum-green
warrior determination to find in materials at hand a means to give persuasive
shape to ecological concerns. That her installation is set off by the
concrete brutalism of Marcel Breuer's Whitney lends weight to a sense
of a life-bearing planet floating precariously in a cold universe.

***

Sarah Sze's genius is to intuit
the dual nature of the found object as thing in itself and freed form.
In her handling, a half-used bottle of Windex is at once a signifier of
false consciousness (a pollutant that cleans) and a bright blue shape,
jarring and harmonizing simultaneously. This instinct is invariably lacking
in those invited to make large-scale museum installations, but it thrives
quietly among artists working on a private, even intimate scale within
the tradition of collage. A felicitous complement to the Sarah Sze experience
is offered close at hand by Pavel Zoubok, a young dealer who represents
important practitioners, contemporary and historical, in this now somewhat
specialist niche.

His summer show deftly pairs
collages and assemblages he has collected by a roster of artists. Collage,
of course, is intrinsically actual, but the comparison between two- and
three-dimensional appropriation and manipulation proves rich in yield.
You'd expect the sculptural objects to be more visceral than their pictorial
counterparts, and yet often with the artists at hand the objects are encased
or boxed, or - in the case of Ray Johnson's chopped in half-volume of
Robert Frost poems - wrapped up, somehow making what's contained more
ethereal.

Joseph Cornell leads the way
in this respect: He is represented by an exquisitely mysterious boxed
glass rabbit; the dark, coppery luminous glow of the box's interior is
bounced around by shards of mirror. Other box makers like Joan Hall and
Varujan Boghosian share with Cornell a connection with the votary, but
they do not tap his particular vein of preciousness. In the case of May
Wilson, her papier collé, though seamless, is also visceral, whereas
her found objects are sprayed in silver paint that makes them seem sealed
in like cast sculptures.

Michael Cooper is an artist
who links Cornell's and Ms. Sze's sensibilities. Mr. Cooper's objects
are diptychs of plexi boxes which contain accumulated scraps - keys, screws,
ornaments - collected by color. According to Mr. Zoubok, the artist continues
to add to the collection until a piece is sold. His collages here are
similarly monochromatic arrangements of metallic reflective material.

Assemblages of a traditionalist
stripe are provided by the redoubtable Hannelore Baron, and a kindred
spirit, Ilse Getz, who offsets an artfully distressed wooden paddle with
porcelain balls and a tiny doll. This is classic assemblage, a depiction
of precarious beauty alienated in a brutal world.

Nostalgia is, across the board,
a defining aspect of the collagists at Zoubok, which might ultimately
be what edges Sarah Sze apart from their sensibility. Mind you, Al Hansen
is free of it, too, with his outsiderish Venuses of Willendorf created
out of cigarettes or matches. You have to love the prurient visual and
verbal punning with which he intimates the pubic region with heads of
spent matches.